Building culture requires the willingness to listen, to hear, to learn and to act

If you want to build culture that brims with the ability to engage employees, it is an absolute essential that communication flows brilliantly. 

Perhaps you already feel you're good at this, with your many newsletters, email shots, posters on the backs of the loo doors, and quarterly all-hands briefings, but really those just show intent to communicate, not communication itself. Talking at people is monologue.

The sort of communication that builds engagement goes infinitely further. It's the difference between shock-and-awe (or more like, poppycock-and-bore, am I right?) and hearts-and-minds; the difference between dropping a belly full of word-bombs in an easily-deletable flyby and breaking bread together with a specific intention of sharing.

It's honestly transformational. Without taking the time to listen, to hear and to learn, you never have anything fresh to act upon. You've got as much hope of turning your organisation's innate brilliance into a transformational idea as one of those grizzled alchemists from the 1400s had of turning lead into gold.

By taking the time however, you'll launch yourself on a voyage of discovery that could forever eradicate all your natural paths to regression that right now, feel so much like safe harbours.

The challenge for those in charge, is letting go of the belief that it's on them to come up with ideas and innovations. That belief creates enough pressure alone, but it's amplified when many are constrained by MBA-level structural thinking that isolates them from the heartbeat of the organisation through levels of control and deluxe admin bunkers.

If this is a hard thing to read, trust me when I say it’s a hard thing to write.

The good money says you lack any decent mechanisms for meaningful two-way communication. If you were able to hear your voices, it's an even better bet you have no capability at all for doing anything with their ideas. And you lack these things because in your heart-of-hearts, you think of it as some sort of Pandora's box or perhaps you just don't actually care.

It's not so much an indictment of you, as it is of the way we've learned to manage through recycled ideas. But it is your responsibility (literally, whoever you are), to change that.

As macabre as it may be, the current pandemic is the sort of deus ex machina, concerned managers may have been hoping for for years. Where your organisation's operating motif may previously have been command and control, however thickly veiled, the only practical method of engagement right now is to listen.

You don't have all the answers any more. Nobody does. But collectively, there is strength to draw upon. I am obsessed with the idea that if you treat your own organisation as the university from which you learn, you can deepen your understanding of what makes you tick when you're ticking at your best, almost instantly.

So here's an idea: push the manual aside for a little bit and try on something new. Have some fun. Engage people and invite them to share what they know, what they have learned, what they have figured out and what they have invented as they have come to terms with their own WWAH experience.

And here's a very specific idea. Run a weekly show and tell.

I don’t know who first invented show and tell, but my five year old is as excited when that comes around as I was when I was five, many decades ago. It’s an idea that never loses its appeal because of two things: it invites you to demonstrate what you know, what you care about or are proud of, essentially inviting you to brag a little … and it’s almost entirely open to interpretation. Show and tellers get to decide what to present.

Guide it a little. Specifically ask for work / life hacks that your team members have come up with, to reduce stress, make work more enjoyable, and get things done without having to put in 18 hour days.

Create a time limit of three minutes (it's way longer than you think it is) so you can get through five people per weekly meeting without putting additional stress on all your shy ones ... and then please, please please ... do something with the ideas. We can help with that!

It’s time now. Seriously.